Latest Lessons

Back in the Eighties, during the heyday of metal, bands like Van Halen, Judas Priest and the Scorpions were releasing incredible, killer albums packed with amazing guitar playing.

Today, I feel that the majority of metal is more focused on rhythmic parts with less harmonic movement than what I think of as the approach representative of Eighties-style metal. It is from that perspective that I put together the three “classic” metal-style riffs featured in this month’s column.

The basic idea? You trill on a string with your fretting hand, then use your picking-hand pinky to catch harmonics. You can move your finger back and forth over the pickups, and you will catch different harmonics at different points along the sting. You have to be very gentle with your picking hand, otherwise you will "choke" the string and won't produce harmonics.

A question I’m often asked, aside from, “How can you possibly be that good looking?” is, “What do you do to warm up?”

Personally, I don’t think about warming up that much, maybe not as much as most players do. But we’ve been touring a lot lately, and, especially in Europe, there just aren’t any heaters anywhere.

So, basically, I am freezing all day long. Then I’m given a guitar five minutes before we go onstage, and I’m expected to be able to burn right from the start! And there I am, frozen to the bone. So I will usually grab my guitar a few minutes before the show and play through a bunch of the riffs and patterns illustrated in this month’s column.

Last month I presented the six-note E minor hexatonic scale (E F# G A B D), which has a dark, serious quality that’s ideal for creating a pensive, reflective mood.

I’d now like to turn you on to another, equally appealing and useful hexatonic scale (depending on your musical tastes), one that is comprised of the very same notes, which would qualify it as a mode, but sounds completely different—beautifully bright and joyous—and that is D major hexatonic (D E F# G A B).

For the uninitiated, a B-bender is a contraption (the perfect word for it) that lives in- or outside your guitar and allows you to pull—usually with some sort of arm, palm, shoulder or hip movement—your guitar's B string up a perfect whole step. So, a B note would suddenly become a C# (or a C, if you don't bend the string all the way).

The notion of sweeping (or raking) the pick across the strings to produce a quick succession of notes has been around since the invention of the pick itself. Jazz players from the Fifties would use the approach in their improvisations, and Chet Atkins was known to eschew his signature fingerstyle hybrid-picking technique from time to time and rip out sweep-picked arpeggios.

Part of my role as a member of former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts’ band, Great Southern (along with his son, guitarist Duane Betts), is to provide improvised rhythm guitar parts to songs that oftentimes develop into long jams with many instrumental solos.

Many of these songs—like “Blue Sky,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “No One Left to Run With”—feature soloing sections built upon repeating chord vamps.

In this endeavor, I have developed a rhythm guitar approach that I can use in any of these jamming-type situations, which is to explore small chord voicings that connect to one another via voice leading techniques, such as close voicing.

In this first lesson, you’ll learn how to use 7th and 7#11 arpeggios to outline the tritone sub in a ii V I chord progression, allowing you to take your soloing chops up a notch and begin to create lines in the same vibe as your favorite jazz guitarists at the same time.

As you might know, the minor blues scale has that unique note that distinguishes it from the pentatonic scale (the augmented 4th or diminished 5th). In Am blues, for example, it’s Eb or D# (They are enharmonic tones, same pitch, different names). But when should we call it the first or the latter — and what’s the difference?

A fan of classical music, Randy Rhoads was one of the first American guitarists to successfully incorporate classical music elements into heavy metal. (“Euro-metal” guitarists, including Ritchie Blackmore, Yngwie Malmsteen, Uli Jon Roth and Michael Schenker, had also experimented with melding the two genres.)